Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/205

 but regarded it not. A second peal!—she listened not to its warnings. A third time the bell, with its deep and iron tongue, startled the assembled company, and silenced the music! Mina then turned her eyes from her partner, and saw reflected in the mirror, a form, a shadow, a spectre: it was her husband! He was standing between her and the young Florentine, and whispered in a solemn and melancholy tone the accustomed accents, ‘Mina, I am here!’—She instantly fell dead.

“Lewis was not a very successful writer. His ‘Monk’ was abused furiously by Matthias, in his ‘Pursuits of Literature,’ and he was forced to suppress it. ‘Abellino’ he merely translated. ‘Pizarro’ was a sore subject with him, and no wonder that he winced at the name. Sheridan, who was not very scrupulous about applying to himself literary property at least, manufactured his play without so much as an acknowledgment, pecuniary or otherwise, from Lewis’s ideas; and bad as ‘Pizarro’ is, I know (from having been on the Drury-Lane Committee, and knowing, consequently, the comparative profits of plays,) that it brought in more money than any other play has ever done, or perhaps ever will do.